by Tom Rose
The razor-sharp tip pierced the lustrous black skin of the graceful giant. A primer charge planted at the end of the harpoon detonated as it lodged inside the whale. Recoiling from the shock of a bomb literally exploding inside it, the whale roared in confusion and terror as it plunged below the waterline in a hopeless attempt to escape its fate. The next blast came seconds later. This bomb, on a five-second fuse, detonated even deeper inside the whale and tore apart its pulmonary cavity.
Roy waited patiently for the sound of that second blast, which was his signal to raise his forty-pound brass shoulder gun to land still more exploding shells at or near the whale’s head, a target so huge he could hardly miss. The whale surfaced, exhaling a geyser of blood, at which point Roy jerked the trigger of the lumbering weapon back toward him. The charge misfired. Instead of detonating only after it had lodged inside the whale, it instead exploded on contact. Chunks of charred blubber spewed in all directions. The whale fell back into the sea, leaving a storm of crimson hail in its wake.
Roy reloaded and fired twice more. The whale violently writhed in a frantic but powerful attempt to unshackle the inflated sealskin floats tied to the harpoon securely lodged inside it. The whale spun circles as the red water foamed in its wake.
After Roy scored his third shot securely in the whale’s arched back, Malik motioned the helmsman to steer him still closer to the crippled and disoriented whale. As wounded as it was, the whale was still capable of escaping the crew, if not its fate, by plunging deep beneath the surface. If Malik could hit the whale with another wire-guided harpoon, the harpoon’s floats might slow down the whale just enough to kill it. Malik readied and fired again. The sudden bloat of the whale’s shiny black skin signaled another hit. The whale’s huge tail caught one side of the boat, slamming it violently forward into its diamond-shaped shoulder blade.
Drenched in the whale’s blood, the men grabbed hold of the gunwales to steady themselves inside their rocking dinghy. When Malik regained enough balance to look up, he saw a sluggish whale too gravely injured to carry on much longer. Concerned that the bowhead might make one last attempt to dive beneath a patch of ice before it died, Malik reached for another harpoon. Just because the beast was mortally wounded did not mean it had yet been subdued. The whale’s size and its will to live could still push it onward for many miles, prolonging the endurance test between whale and Eskimo.
Malik need not have worried. Before he could fire again, the whale suddenly and quietly succumbed. Now the challenge was to secure their prize before it sank and the men did not have much time. Three other whaling crews out that morning watched and cheered the strike through binoculars from their respective vantage points stretched across the Chukchi horizon. Once the whale was dead, neighborly cooperation replaced friendly competition. Upon confirmation that the whale had succumbed, the sidelined crews went from passive spectators to active participants. They rushed to help Malik’s crew keep the dead whale on the surface so it could be towed to shore for butchering.
As in ancient times, the modern way of “sharing the whale wealth” was to distribute the tasty proceeds in accordance to the contribution of the recipient. The more a crew participated, the more meat it got. The crews now rushing to Malik’s assistance would be compensated with the butchered whales’ choicest cuts.
People have always been the most important resource in a subsistence whaling community. The act of hunting, catching, securing, towing, butchering, distributing, and disposing of a creature as large as a bowhead whale required as many people as possible to help. Dragging a giant dead whale onto the beach for butchering—particularly one this size and during such an unusual time of year—is no small task. As word spread that Malik’s crew had a whale in tow, Barrowans readied themselves to help.
Within minutes, regular programming on KBRW-AM, the only commercial radio station on Alaska’s North Slope (serving an area bigger than the state of California) was interrupted to broadcast news of the kill, particularly Malik’s current sea location so that designated town volunteers with boats could meet Malik at sea and help his crew ballast the whale and bring it safely to shore. Within an hour, more than eighty people in twenty-two boats had arrived on the scene. Even with such help, it still took four hours to haul the mammoth carcass across six miles of choppy seas and back to the beach.
By the time Malik and his six-man crew did get back to shore, it was too dark for them to see the hundreds of people who had assembled to greet and assist them. This was the moment every whaler dreamed of as a child and cherishes as he ages.
Before Christianity made its way to the Arctic coast in the early nineteenth century, Inuits, like nearly every pagan subsistence culture ever studied, revered—even worshipped—the source of their sustenance. That this seems somehow remarkable to us shows how the most revolutionary conceptual discoveries are quickly assumed to have been obvious to all. But this was not the case and native peoples were there to prove it. Before the notion that our world was created by a God that transcends time and space, it was only natural for people to worship a visible product of creation than an unseen, unknown creator. The religious revolution was to see God not in nature, but above and in control of nature.
Combining the ancient pagan practices of their ancestors with their own late twentieth-century American Protestantism, Malik gathered everyone on the beach to hear him offer thanks to the whale and to the God who created it. Then Malik’s wife emptied a plastic bucket filled with fresh water into the dead whale’s open mouth and then into its blowhole. Somehow, this “Arctic baptism” would make the whale’s spirit a permanent part of the village. While no doubt thankful for the honor, the whale would probably have preferred to have restored to him what was once rightfully his.
If Barrowans wanted their whale meat raw—which they did—the butchering had to start straight away. If left unbutchered, even for a short time, and even in freezing temperatures, the process of decomposition would quickly convert the dead whale’s massive energy supply into heat, roasting the carcass at temperatures near 300 degrees. Malik assigned several men to start carving up the whale.
Like Lilliputians tying down Gulliver, a half-dozen Eskimos mounted and climbed ladders against the side of the dead whale, carrying sharp fan-shaped knives mounted on traditional long wooden handles, called ulus. They stood on top of the two-story-high carcass, carving the blubber into a checkerboard pattern. Hot putrid air hit them in the face as they ripped two-foot-thick squares of muktuk from the whale’s back with large iron hooks.
Plumes (more like big puffs) of steam purged from the whale as the men peeled away the long slabs of blubber. The steam could be seen for miles around Barrow’s flat, featureless plain. Lying hundreds of miles farther north than the hardiest tree could grow, it didn’t take much height for something to be seen from great distances. It took less than an hour for the entire circumference of the fifty-five-foot whale to be stripped clean of its muktuk, leaving something that looked more like a pink airplane fuselage than the skinless remains of a fifty-five-foot whale. The slabs of muktuk were quickly spirited into twenty-two neat piles reserved for each crew involved in the hunt. While the property of the each crew’s chief, the piles were payment to be dispensed at the chief’s discretion.
Once the muktuk had been stripped, the butchers went back to work removing the whale’s meat by repeating the same process of cutting giant rectangular slaps and then peeling them off. By dawn the next morning, the entire operation, employing over a thousand people, was all but done. With a few more tasks, the forty-ton whale, the carefree master of the sea just hours before, had been hunted, ruthlessly killed, towed to the beach, and carved into thousands of pieces.
By 1988, whale was more of a luxury than anything approaching a necessity. The Inuits could get through a winter without whale meat the same way you could get through your winters without whale meat. While the cookie-cutter politically correct (that is, false) portrayals of native Inuit life emphasized the price that
modernization was extracting from their traditions and culture, it was a price everyone, including Malik, was more than happy to pay. Survival beats starvation, and a modern heated home trumps exposure. Nonetheless, Malik’s catch assured that this winter would be both modern and traditional.
Until their once impenetrable isolation was broken, subsistence whaling villages like Barrow killed only as many whales as they needed to survive—although for reasons having everything to do with what was practical (hunting, killing. and securing giants whales was far from easy) and almost nothing to do with what was “environmentally responsible.” As World War II ended, the modern industrialized nations with commercial whaling industries suddenly realized the only way to save their dying industry was to save the few whales they had not yet killed. The first global effort at whale conservation came in 1946, with the establishment of the International Whaling Commission (IWC).
Ostensibly, the IWC was created to allow whale populations to recover by limiting the number of whales legally permitted to be killed each year and by regulating what kind of whales could be killed and by what nations. Exemptions became the rule. Nations like Japan and the Soviet Union successfully argued with some truth that their whaling industries were needed to help their economies recover from the war. Norway and Iceland made the same argument but with no truth. Although invaded by the Nazis in early 1940, Norway was overrun so quickly it suffered almost no war damage, while Iceland emerged from the war in far better shape than it entered it as a result of its role as the primary Allied staging area for the vital war of the Atlantic.
The United States and Canada argued that their own Eskimo populations, barely removed from subsistence status, deserved the right to continue subsistence whaling. These “subsistence quotas” were based on the size of each village and the projected number of whales in their areas. As the number of whales increased, so too would the quotas.
As with most well-intentioned government interventions, the IWC mandates delivered the opposite of what they were intended to produce. Rather than limit subsistence whaling, the IWC quota system created a range of new incentives that markedly increased whaling.
Now, rather than just hunt for what was needed, Eskimo communities had a valuable new resource; the tradable commodity of whale quotas.
Each year, Eskimo settlements from Russia to Norway to the United States would eagerly await news of the IWC’s quota announcements to learn how many whales their communities were permitted to take. In 1988, the International Whaling Commission gave the people of Barrow, Alaska, a quota of eight whales it could hunt; many more than they needed to insure that everyone in Barrow had plenty of whale meat. Malik’s strike marked Barrow’s fifth IWC-approved whale. While all five were bowheads, there was no rule that said they had to be.
Another unintended consequence of IWC action was to create markets for whales that otherwise would never have been hunted. According to the IWC, Barrow whalers were free to fill their eight whale quota with any eight whales they could get their hands on.
Remember the three California gray whales we left aimlessly frolicking off the Barrow coast? Well, this is both where and how they enter our story. Until the IWC’s quota system, no one in Barrow would have given the gray whales a second thought, let alone invited them home for dinner. But the IWC’s quotas created artificial demand for any kind of whale, tasty or otherwise. The organization established to save whales created new reasons to kill them.
Thus the three California grays could be legally hunted and killed just as if they were bowhead whales, but only if certified native Alaskan blood—whatever in the world that was—coursed through the hunter’s veins. Even though gray whales were inedible due to their barnacled skin and tough acrid meat, Barrowans still had three more whales they could legally kill before the end of the year—which was rapidly approaching. The IWC’s counterproductive interventions didn’t stop there. Not only were subsistence whaling towns allowed to kill any kind of whales they could catch, they were also allowed to “trade” their quota—that is, sell their excess whales to other villages. Towns could contract whale hunts for other towns, even if they had reached their own annual limits. Call it cap and trade for whales.
Barrow was not only the oldest continuously settled Eskimo village in the world, but by 1988 it had become the biggest. It was home (adopted or otherwise) to the greatest whaling legends, and some of the greatest whalers, like Malik. Not surprisingly, it also became the home port to a new and valuable little industry—professional subsistence whaling.
On Thursday, October 6, 1988, Roy Ahmaogak, a member of Malik’s crew, got a phone call from someone in the village of Nuiqsut, a tiny inland Eskimo settlement eighty miles south of Barrow. The Eskimos of Nuiqsut survived by roaming the frozen tundra in search of land animals. Nobody from Nuiqsut would have had a clue what to do with a whale had one managed to flop its way across eighty miles of tundra to their front door. Whaling was as alien to Nuiqsut as tarpon fishing was to Barrowans. At least it was before the IWC.
The Nuiqsut caller asked Roy if he could help hunt for any of the three whales allotted to the village’s quota. If Roy got lucky, he and his crew could make a tidy profit partnering with Nuiqsut to sell those whales on the international market. One whale could fetch $50,000 in 1988, if not more. That was plenty enough to interest Roy Ahmaogak.
Over the next few days the weather took a nasty turn toward winter. Temperatures plummeted to twenty degrees below zero. Strong winds pushed the massive polar ice pack south on its annual surge toward the Barrow coast. Each day saw new ice that was forming around the shore expand farther out to sea. In the next few weeks, the new ice would stretch for miles covering the surface of the Chukchi Sea, eventually the constantly expanding and contracting polar ice pack. When the two met, the new shoreside ice would be consumed by and subsumed into the floating pack, perhaps never again to melt.
As large as Australia in winter, the polar ice pack is thought to be the biggest single piece of ice in our solar system. For millions of years, the polar ice pack has floated frozen across the top of the world thousands of feet thick. For nine months of the year, it stretches across 3,000 miles of sea from Alaska to Norway. In summer, the circumference of the pack shrinks as its outer edges melt away. Every year, gigantic icebergs the size of Rhode Island break off and float freely in the icy Arctic Ocean until reconnected to the encroaching pack during the next change of season. During July and early August, the last of the snow and ice melt away from Barrow’s beaches. By the beginning of October, summer in the Arctic is only a memory.
Winter was back.
Roy told the caller from Nuiqsut he would look, but was not optimistic. It was too late in the year, he said. Surely, by now, all the whales would have left the area on their way south for winter breeding and birthing. Nonetheless, Roy Ahmaogak spent a good part of Friday, October 7, 1988, riding his ski machine up and down the coast around Point Barrow on the lookout for any signs of straggler whales. Daylight hours and temperatures were both fading fast. By the time he ended his search, the temperature had dropped to twenty-five degrees below zero. Roy turned his ski machine around and started back to Barrow across the eighteen miles of glassy-smooth Arctic Ocean ice, convinced there were no whales to be found.
But as he passed the long sandbar north of Point Barrow on his ride back to town, he drove right past the stranded whales just after they had surfaced for air. Roy excitedly jumped off his ski machine, hoping to find bowheads. Instead, when they popped back up he saw they were California grays. They weren’t flocking anymore. Now, trapped under a growing ice patch, they appeared in full panic. Since the thin ice around the whales was too weak to support his weight Roy could not get any closer to them. Still, he was plenty close enough to clearly make them out. It appeared as if the whales were clinging to an air hole barely big enough to fit their heads through.
It looked like their game was up. As soon as that hole froze over, which wouldn’t be long, the whales would
drown. As much as Roy might have wanted to help, he knew there was nothing anybody could, or perhaps even should do, to help these now helpless giants. This was nature. Who knew how many whales died every year after failing to escape the icy Arctic waters in time? The carcasses of decayed whales that washed up on shore every spring proved the answer was “plenty.”
When he got back to Barrow, Roy unloaded his bear rifle and assorted standard-issue Arctic survival gear from the ski machine, and went inside to warm up. After snatching a bite to eat, Roy called two biologist friends, Craig George and Geoff Carroll, who ran the local wildlife management office. He told them what he had just seen on the ice. To ask who could have predicted that a routine report of a routine whale stranding literally at the top of the world would end up becoming the biggest animal rescue ever attempted is the wrong question. A better question might be, Why would anyone have made such a prediction? Sure, small isolated events can trigger greater global events—think World War I—but whales stranded at the top of world, not by man but nature?
Within just three weeks, at least twenty-six television networks from all over the world would converge upon one of the world’s most isolated and hard-to-get-to towns, just to broadcast live, up-to-the-minute reports about three California gray whales popping their heads in and out of small holes in the Arctic ice. The images would captivate the world—or at least captivate those drawn to television news. The most widely covered media nonevent in the history of electronic news was now officially underway. Suddenly the nonevent had very much transformed itself into something very real.
Of course, for Eskimos the only news was that the whale stranding itself was news. Noah Webster defined news as “new information about things previously unknown.” Everyone in Barrow knew that gray whales died under Arctic ice. So what was newsworthy about this? Apparently plenty. The rapidly unfolding rescue of the three whales would cost tens of millions of dollars, involve the president of the United States, the general secretary of the Soviet Union, push a democratic government to the brink of collapse, and capture the attention, if not the imagination, of millions around the world before two of the three whales would eventually be freed. Journalists from competing networks would trample each other in pursuit of new angles of a nonstory while becoming far bigger stories in and of themselves.